False prophets

They are the clergy for the digital age, an elite class that claims to know what is best for the unlettered plebeians. The trouble with all such righteous causes is that they attract the bullies who seek an approved outlet for their baser instincts. Some don the sacerdotal robes out of a sense of duty, others as a disguise.

Culture wars

These cultural revolutionaries are engaged in an ongoing collective effort to destabilise and reorganise society around their ideological principles, underpinned by the conviction that the powerful – defined solely by group identity – are unaware of the structures that they unwittingly perpetuate. In this battle, however, the chief antagonists consider themselves to be under siege. In this perverse formulation, the defense of liberal principles is taken as an attack. – The new puritans are brawlers with a persecution complex, wildly throwing punches at strangers and then blaming them for the bloodstains on their hands.

One in five (This quote being from Rudy Havenstein’s Substack)

In the early years of this century, Bernard Shaw asked the explorer Henry Stanley how many of his men could take over leadership of the party if he, Stanley, were ill. ‘One in twenty,’ said Stanley. ‘Is that figure exact or approximate?’ ‘Exact.’

The matter of the dominant 5 per cent was rediscovered during the Korean War by the Chinese. Wishing to economise on man-power, they decided to divide their American prisoners into two groups: the enterprising ones and the passive ones. They soon discovered that the enterprising soldiers were exactly one in twenty: 5 per cent. When this dominant 5 per cent was removed from the rest of the group, the others could be left with almost no guard at all.

What characterizes them

The hectoring and dogmatic tone, the obscene generalisations, the unfalsifiable claims in lieu of evidence, the lack of self-awareness, the narcissistic conviction that they can read other people’s minds, the impulse to interpret critics in the most uncharitable possible way, the outright bigotry and intolerance of dissent: all of this is characteristic of the new puritans.

Not thinking

The new puritans are adept at reaching a consensus almost immediately on any given issue, largely because the tenets of Critical Social Justice are already rigidly established. They are following a script, not thinking for themselves.

Words are violence

So it has come to this. Liberalism is akin to Nazism. Words are violence. Debate is a fetish. We have somehow found ourselves in this mystifying scenario in which self-declared ‘liberals’ are advancing an illiberal agenda, ‘leftists’ are failing to stand up for left-wing ideals, ‘social justice’ means the opposite of what it says, and ‘anti-racists’ are creating a more racist society.

Conformity

We are living through a frenzy of conformity, in which the opinions of a minority of activists are falsely presented by the media, political and corporate classes as though they reflect an established consensus.